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After more than half a century of business on Capitol Hill, the Hilltop Service Station on 15th Ave E is slated to be no more. Customers have been told the station’s last day of service is coming — possibly this week.

Cadence Capital, a Colorado-based real estate and development firm, finalized an agreement to purchase the property last month, according to King County records, making the deal official and paving the way for the property to be acquired and redeveloped. Financial details and terms of the memorandum of agreement are not yet publicly available. Continue reading →

Carmen Best has served Seattle citizens on the sometimes-dangerous streets of the city for 26 years. Now she has successfully navigated the equally sometimes-times dangerous pathways at City Hall to win confirmation as the Chief of Police in Seattle, the 22nd most populous city in the nation.

“As the new police Chief, I’ll continue to lead our department through a culture of continuous improvement and innovation,” Best said in a statement released Monday following her official swearing-in: Continue reading →

Honor Coffee, a Seattle-area chain that got its early start on a hoped path to market in China with a 2015 opening on Capitol Hill, has quietly closed one of its two cafes in the neighborhood.

The Honor cafe at 15th and Pine is dark and empty this week. CHS was told by a person familiar with the situation that Honor decided not to renew its lease for the space. We have not heard back from Honor Cafe’s Hana Hu about the closure. Continue reading →

Born in the park three summers ago, the Lusio light and sound event bloomed in Volunteer Park Friday night before fading away — again — until next year.

The annual free night of art and music drew what appeared to be its largest crowd yet. The word interactive gets abused so much that it means nearly the opposite but at Lusio, the term pays off: Continue reading →

Pike/Pine shots: Gunfire involving reports of at least two armed males shooting at each other rattled Pike/Pine early Monday morning. There were no reported injuries and no immediate reports of property damage. Seattle Police received multiple 911 calls around 12:10 AM after gunfire broke out on 10th Ave near Lost Lake Cafe. Police spread out across the area searching for suspects matching the descriptions provided by witnesses including two different males reported carrying handguns. According to East Precinct radio dispatches, another male was seen running to a white SUV parked west of Cal Anderson yelling, “They’re shooting at me.” Police searched for the reported shooters and the vehicle seen leaving the area but there were no immediate arrests. Continue reading →

Outcomes of a new effort at City Hall to study rental housing trends show challenges for both tenants and landlords — and that larger developments are asking for higher rents than smaller buildings.

A group of researchers from the University of Washington surveyed both landlords and renters in the Seattle area to learn about the state of the rental market and the effectiveness of recent ordinances enacted by the City Council.

While the Seattle Rental Housing Study did not deal with broader trends, such as overall rent prices, it did deal with the attitudes of those involved in the rental market. The research was required by two city ordinances passed in 2016 and included in the 2017 budget. Ordinance 125114 prohibits unfair practices for screening and choosing tenants and Ordinance 125222 limits security deposits and non-refundable move-in fees.

Despite their goal of aiding renters, the team’s focus groups had no familiarity with the new ordinances and were skeptical about their effectiveness.

“All of the renters that we spoke to in all of the focus groups, they expressed a high level of barriers to housing access,” research lead Kyle Crowder said at a July 24th meeting of the Seattle City Council’s renters rights committee about recent movers his team surveyed,

The barriers renters are referring to are more numerous than just the lack of affordability in Seattle, but that was one of the most frequently cited issues.

“The renters that we spoke to in our focus groups feel squeezed financially by the housing market,” Crowder, a professor of sociology at the UW, said at the meeting. “That was a common theme.”

Other problems mentioned by renters were a “lack of transparency in application/leasing process” and discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or source of income, especially for voucher recipients, according to the study. Continue reading →

When we live in human altered spaces and inhabit a cultural space dominated by binaries, it’s incredibly easy to create a false dichotomy about the natural world. This stems from a troubling belief that if we are in place like the Hill, are not a part of nature. And, if we travel out to say, an alpine meadow in the Cascades, we’re in nature. We think of unkempt greenspaces on the edges of our urban landscape as awful, non-native, invaded landscapes, and idealize the seemingly natural, wild, or “untrammeled” spaces beyond our fold.

The CHS Flickr Pool contains more than 36,000 photographs — most of Capitol Hill images, many glorious, some technically amazing. The pool is a mix of contributions from Capitol Hill — and nearby — shutterbugs. Interested in being part of it? If we like your photo and it helps us tell the story, we may feature it on CHS so please include your name and/or a link to your website so we can properly credit you. Interested in working as a paid CHS contributor for scheduled assignments? Drop us a line.

The 12th Ave arts and business community has responded to an act of vandalism targeting a work exploring the visual legacy of the Black Panther Party by incorporating the image damaged in the attack into their storefronts and buildings.

12th Ave’s Photographic Center Northwest is at the center of the effort: Continue reading →

CHS CALENDAR

Bench Mark, a Partnership for Youth exhibition, is an exploration of architecture through space, function, and purpose. Created during sixteen after-school sessions March–May 2018, this collection of works traces the design thinking process students applied while considering Seattle’s urban environment and humans’ … Continue reading →

Born to Mexican immigrants in Walla Walla, WA, Juventino Aranda’s search for self-identity informs his process as it relates to the social, political, and economic struggles of Chicanos. His art and activist practices are influenced by the grassroots movements of … Continue reading →

Join us for our six-ish mile all paces run. For Tuesday run, we have a winter route at 5.7 mi and a summer route at 6.3 mi. The summer route explores the trails of Interlaken and the Arboretum. The winter … Continue reading →

General class is open to all students and starts with 45 minutes of stretching and calisthenics, followed by 45 minutes of drill. In this class the students are drilled on techniques specific to their belt level. Exercises include combination, target, … Continue reading →

Join Chabad of Capitol Hill for our weekly Kabbalah and Coffee Tanya – A Masterpiece of Chassidic wisdom written by Rabbi Shneur Zalmen of Liadi (1745 – 1812). Based on the Kabbalistic works of the Zohar, the Baal Shem Tov … Continue reading →